Michael Heizer Earth Art Ephemera

Michael Heizer, Double Negative [sic] notes and fuse (two works [sic]), 1971, via lamodern Michael Heizer built Double Negative in 1969-70, and in the early days eyewitnesses were sparse. Curator Jan van der Marck told the story of visiting Double Negative and Walter de Maria’s Las Vegas Piece on a Viriginia Dwan-organized junket in early 1970, blazing across the desert with German art volks in the back of Heizer’s truck. MoMA curator Jennifer Licht seems to have gone with Heizer in November 1971, just before she made the presentation to the trustees on the museum’s acquisitions committee about Double Negative, Las Vegas Piece, and Spiral Jetty that appears in Calvin Tomkins’ 1972 New Yorker feature on earth art. I say seems because that is the implication of the annotations on these two pieces of Michael Heizer ephemera that just turned up at auction in Los Angeles, from Licht’s collection. One, a loop of dynamite fuse taped to a sheet of paper, is labeled “Dynamite from Double…